Twitter CEO takes swipe at Facebook’s Libra

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and longtime Bitcoin supporter, is choosing not to jump on the Libra bandwagon. He told The Sydney Morning Herald that Bitcoin is still the internet’s “best bet” for a native currency—rather than a commercial alternative.

Dorsey has long supported Bitcoin, and has been speaking openly about his support for the project over the last few months. He’s invested in Lightning Labs, which is building Lighting, a solution designed to help Bitcoin scale and he also owns Square, which made $2 million in profit in Q2 2019 by selling Bitcoin. But Dorsey doesn’t just think it is better than the current swathe of altcoins, but thinks it outperforms commercial projects, such as Facebook’s upcoming Libra.

“Open internet standards serve every person better than ones controlled or started by companies," Dorsey told the Australian media outlets.

The Twitter CEO added that Twitter will not seek to challenge Facebook’s Libra—or any other commercially run cryptocurrency project—by creating its own coin. Instead, Dorsey’s preference is for "existing, open standards"—in the same way that the internet evolved in its early years. 

Sentiment is against Facebook’s Libra, says survey of 140,000 analysts

Facebook’s Libra is not the only cryptocurrency project in development by a centralized company or designed to be run by an organization of companies. The main implementation of the XRP ledger is written by Ripple and nodes typically use a recommended list of validators—some run by Ripple itself. Zcash is largely built by the Electric Coin Company. And possibly the most centralized of all, China’s Central Bank Digital Currency will be run entirely by the Chinese Central Bank.

But Dorsey and Facebook have history. Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500 million back in 2008, but Twitter declined the offer. And Facebook spent years gobbling up users while Twitter’s growth flatlined. According to Statista, Facebook has surpassed 2 billion users, growing at a rate of around 2.5% every quarter, whereas Twitter lags behind, with 330 million users (at the end of 2018), and is losing around 5% every quarter. 

Which means Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t care what Dorsey thinks.